Coral Bones

Will tropical coral reefs be the first ecosystem to be eliminated by climate change?

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Reefs and responsibility

...Coral reefs, the rainforest of the ocean, are home for one-third of the species in the sea. Coral reefs are under stress for several reasons, including warming of the ocean, but especially because of ocean acidification, a direct effect of added carbon dioxide. Ocean life dependent on carbonate shells and skeletons is threatened by dissolution as the ocean becomes more acid...

-- James Hansen in a talk to the National Press Club, and briefing to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence & Global Warming, 23 June 2008.

...CEOs of fossil energy companies know what they are doing and are aware of long-term consequences of continued business as usual. In my opinion, these CEOs should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.

Conviction of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal CEOs will be no consolation, if we pass on a runaway climate to our children. Humanity would be impoverished by ravages of continually shifting shorelines and intensification of regional climate extremes. Loss of countless species would leave a more desolate planet...

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Grief in time

Caspar Henderson reviews A Reef in Time - The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to Endby J. E. N. Veron

Why care about the loss of biodiversity? A simple answer is that not doing so will be more expensive than doing so. The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, a report published in May of this year by the German government and the European Commission, suggests that current rates of natural decline might reduce global GDP by 7% by 2050, with the world’s poorest people affected the most. But even if this cautious estimate turns out to be right it is unlikely to tell the whole story.

To see why, consider the Great Barrier Reef on the northeast coast of Australia, the largest single structure on Earth made by living organisms. Tropical coral reefs reefs are the most diverse, beautiful and intricate assemblages of life in the oceans, arguably on the planet, hosting about a quarter of all ocean species in less than 0.1% of its area. They provide food and vital ecosystem services to hundreds of millions of people in more than 100 countries. The Great Barrier Reef (GBR), the largest UNESCO World Heritage reef area on earth, forms the southern border of the global centre of reef biodiversity in Southeast Asia, and is the only extensive area of reef in within the territory of the rich industrialised country with the resources and expertise to protect it.

And one could not ask for a better guide to the GBR than J. E. N. Veron, the former Chief Scientist with the Australian Institute of Marine Science. ‘Charlie’ Veron is author of the monumental three volume Corals of the World, and is credited with having identified one in four species of coral that are known today. This is the work of an outstanding scientific mind informed by close observation over more than forty years, and by love.

Since the book appeared Veron has explained why he wrote it on climateshifts.org, (the blog of Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a lead author on a key paper on the future of the world’s coral reefs. DOI: 10.1126/science.1152509). Veron writes:

It may seem preposterous that the greatest coral reef in the world – the biggest structure made by life on Earth – could be seriously (I mean genuinely seriously) threatened by climate change. The question itself is probably already relegated in your mind to a ‘here-we-go-again’ catch-bag of greenie diatribe about the state of our planet. This view is understandable given that even a decade ago, there were many scientists who had not yet come to grips with the full implications of climate change.

Very likely you have a feeling that dire predictions about anything almost always turn out to be exaggerations. What you really think is: OK, where there’s smoke there’s fire, so there’s probably something in this to be worried about, somewhere. But, it won’t be as bad as those doom-sayers are predicting. When I started writing ‘A Reef in Time’, I knew that climate change was likely to have serious consequences for coral reefs, but even I was shocked to the core by what all the best science that existed was saying. In a long phase of personal anguish I turned to specialists in many different fields of science to find anything that might suggest a fault in my own conclusions. No luck. The bottom line remains: the GBR can indeed be utterly trashed in the lifetime of today’s children. That certainty is what motivates me to broadcast this message as clearly, as accurately and, yes, as loudly, as I can.

But this book does more than simply convey the central message that climate change – and in particular ocean acidification – threaten to destroy the GBR, and that action to avert this should be a top priority. It also does at least two other useful things. One, it provides a brilliantly clear and authoritative introduction to much of the history of life on earth via a focus on some of the most productive ecosystems in the seven tenths that is ocean. Two, it conveys the stupendous enormity of a mass extinction event which – unless somehow averted – is likely to be the biggest in sixty five million years (i.e. since the K-T). Only five extinctions on such a scale have occurred since multicellular life began more than five hundred million years ago.

The book is also fascinating in its detailed account of the GBR itself, including a plausible account of a 'stone age Utopia' in which aborginal peoples may have lived in caves under what, today (following a rapid rise in sea level at the end of the last glaciation about 11,500 years ago), are coral reefs. [Over the same time frame, Veron points out, limestone caves in southwestern France and northern Spain were decorated with beautiful paintings: Chauvet from 30,000 years ago, Lascaux from 17,000 years ago[1]).

So what hope for the future? The English novelist Ian McEwan has written recently of the strong undertow of apocalyptic thinking in the Christian and Muslim traditions, among others, and the real and present danger this presents to the global community. McEwan hopes that the spirit of curiosity and science may provide an antidote: ‘Where [environmental and other] calamities are posed as mere possibilities in an open-ended future that might be headed off by wise human agency, we cannot consider them as apocalyptic. They are minatory, they are calls to action.’ But he worries that the narrative of science and human reason has only a tenuous hold.

This has to change, and it can do so, if leading scientists such as Veron and many others continue to make the case for a future in which global concentrations of greenhouse gases are held to much lower levels than current trends indicate. It will also require millions and millions of individual and community decisions to engage in political, economic and cultural change. Australia and China, for example, will need to look again at ways they are generating prosperity in the short term by, for example, the massive extraction and combustion of coal (see, for example Good days: Australia prospers from China’s resource needs, Financial Times, 2 April 2008). Fine words from politicians do not scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Veron warns that by 2030 it will be too late. ‘We have to change’, he says, ‘I believe humans are good at change. But there is not an ounce of hope in a world that wants to procrastinate’.

Veron’s book ends a warning from the earth systems scientist James Lovelock made before the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, but which has an added poignancy after it:

The planet we live on has merely to shrug to take some faction of a million people to their death. But this is nothing compared with what may soon happen; we are now abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago [i.e. the PETM] , and if does most of us, and our descendents, will die.

Footnote 1: 'Humans have certainly occupied Australia for 45,000 plus or minus 9,000 years, and, based on current evidence, 53,000 to 60,000 years is the most probable time of original occupation. The oldest human remains, those of Mungo man [are] now the source of the oldest human DNA in the world'. -- Veron, page 178. The earliest known evidence for marine fishing, dating from 32,000 years ago, is from the Huon Peninsular of what is now New Guinea but would at that time have been joined to continental Australia by a land bridge (ibid 180).

"Mike", the world's first hydrogen bomb, vaporised Elugelap island and other parts of the Enewetak atoll on 1 November 1952. In the half century or so since then humans have destroyed around a quarter - some say a half - of all tropical coral reefs, which are one the world's richest and oldest ecosystems and provide vital benefits in over 100 countries. Will the rest be gone within another fifty years - or less? So what?

Please note that this blog is now pretty much 'on hold', with only occasional updates since January 2008. For notes on the Anthropocene extinction and what comes next see The Book of Barely Imagined Beings.

"Coral reefs are in crisis. The consequences for humanity risk being very grave unless more effective action is taken. Few things are more important than increasing awareness and understanding of the issues. Caspar Henderson's investigation is just the sort of thing we need in this struggle" - Kristian Teleki, Director, ICRAN

"The threats posed climate change to the world's most vital ecosystems are grave and imminent. Caspar Henderson's investigation into the future of coral reefs - which are among the most wonderful, and may be the most vulnerable of all - is timely and important. I commend this work to your attention" - Sir John Houghton, former chair of the scientific assessment working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

"Coral reef ecosystems are highly vulnerable to climate change. Hundreds of millions of people depend on them. We need better understanding of what can really make a difference for the better. Caspar Henderson is doing a great job. I strongly support his work " - Mark Lynas

Reflections

"It is impossible to behold these [great breaking] waves without feeling a conviction that an island, though built of the hardest rock, let it be porphyry, granite, or quartz, would ultimately yield and be demolished by such an irresistible power. Yet these low, insignificant coral-islets stand and are victorious: for here another power, as an antagonist, takes part in the contest. The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime, one by one, from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will that tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month? Thus do we see the soft and gelatinous body of a polypus, through the agency of the vital laws, conquering the great mechanical power of the waves of an ocean which neither the art of man nor the inanimate works of nature could successfully resist."
Charles Darwin

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little." Edmund Burke

"Part of the overwhelming sense of awe elicited by reefs comes from the suddenness of the transformation. One moment the oceanic world is flat and nearly featureless, except for the brilliant dance of light on water. And then, like Alice stepping through the looking glass, you stride off the boat and break through that silvery surface. Instantly, you are in a different world. The only line more definitive and mysterious than the one separating the world of air from that of water is the boundary between life and death." Osha Gray Davidson

"Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." Annie Dillard

"The greatest loss is to greedily receive without gratitude." Gautama Buddha (attrib.)

"There is hope; but not for you." Franz Kafka

"It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons." Douglas Adams